If from time to time you happen to listen to a podcast with the subtitle 'Five Hundred Years Of incredible Music' then it would be a reasonable expectation to hear some five hundred year old music. I've played a few pieces from the 1500s and 1600s but as you might expect the focus of the show has been sort of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and Antonio Vivaldi onwards… call it from the early 1700s until today. That means I've left out a good 175 years of music. This episode is going to be a step toward redressing that neglect.

On the day this episode is released, the American composer Philip Glass celebrates his 89th birthday. In a career now lasting well over five decades he has somehow achieved two extraordinarily rare things for a contemporary composer of classical music... a prolific amount of creative output and a degree of broad popularity. For the next hour and a quarter please enjoy a quick survey of five decades of great music… films, operas, concertos, quartets… and an unfairly small section of solo piano music. Happy Birthday!

Only be taken in the very personal sense of… recent discoveries by me. Not that I actually discovered anything. In my ongoing mission to keep the production of CDs alive, I came across music I didn't know and thought that you, my fine listeners, might enjoy. Incidentally, I was chatting with my friend Claude about the episode and his comment was that my title sounded much more dignified than "Music from Last Month's Credit Card Statement." And I urge you not to be discouraged by the idea of unfamiliar music. I promise there is some very lovely listening in the next 75 minutes from… Karl Goldmark, Joaquin Rodrigo, Frederick Delius, Ferdinand Hérold, Carl Nielsen, Andreas Hammerschmidt and Anne Cawrse.

Representing the weather with music is probably an ancient practice. In our earliest superstitions the percussive blasts of thunder would probably have been mimicked to either flatter or placate the spirit world. And perhaps whoever was organising the noisy tributes to the sky gods got something of the same thrill as composers might when they decide to use the weather for inspiration. In the next hour I'm going to give you a sort of chronological meander through what a handful of composers have done with the idea of storms over the last three hundred years with music from Georg Phillip Telemann, Ludwig van Beethoven, Ethel Smythe, Gustav Mahler, Claude Debussy, Jean Sibelius, Dmitri Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten and John Adams.

The name comes from the night of the week when for some of us, the demon of insomnia hits the hardest… and because my preferred antidote is getting lost in some music. Of course this series is for everyone… but it is perhaps intended a little more for those of you whose sleep has been troubled. The idea of the special is to play just one piece, uninterrupted and in its entirety… with a few minutes of background explained at the end of the episode. This month… Cesar Franck's Symphony in D minor from 1888. Performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Seiji Ozawa.

Antonio Salieri was born near Verona in 1750 but lived most of his life in Vienna. And in the 1780s he was possibly the most successful composer in Europe… writing the music for over forty operas. Later in life he taught Schubert and Liszt. He worked with Beaumarchais and da Ponte, and Goethe was a fan. But if today the name Salieri is even vaguely familiar… it is not because of his music… it is because of a rumour implicating him in the death at a young age of another Vienna-based composer. Time to set the record straight. And play some great neglected music.

Classical Music for New Years Eve seems to be dominated by nineteenth century Viennese waltzes and eighteenth century music for fireworks. All nice stuff but I wasn't after something for New Years Eve. I wanted music for New Years Day. And that led to thoughts about renewals, beginnings, clean slates, optimism and second chances. And mysteriously that line of thought led to the idea of dawn and sunrise. So in the next hour and a bit there will be music about that very pretty time of the day... from Maurice Ravel, Joseph Haydn, Ottorino Respighi, Benjamin Britten, Edvard Grieg, Carl Nielsen, Peter Sculthorpe, Augusta Read Thomas and Ludwig van Beethoven. Happy New Year!

Sorcerers, Toys, Wolves, Volcanoes and Fossils. Music for young people… but why them… and why now? In some parts of the world people are having a bit of a holiday as this episode goes out… and you may have your children… or nephews, nieces or grandchildren lying around your home or stuck with you in your car. This is music for them. It can be enjoyed by anyone… but this is a collection of music that can be great early experiences of classical music for young people. Music from Michael Haydn, Paul Dukas, Camille Saint-Saëns, Gareth Farr, Sergei Prokofiev, Benjamin Britten and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

In this episode there will be an amount of Christmas music from the western tradition… which I think you might have to expect from a podcast with the word 'classical' in the title but this is not really a celebration of mangers, shepherds, wise men or difficult to explain conceptions… though I have to confess, some shepherds snuck their way in. A certain amount of the music is just there for the sheer joy of it. Music that has a festive feel and in some instances has a certain holiday exuberance. Works by Corelli, Bach, Mendelssohn, Saint-Saëns, Liszt, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Schoenberg, Mozart, Lilburn and Kats-Chernin.

Music from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Maurice Ravel, Morten Lauridsen, Ralph Vaughan-Williams, Philip Glass and Benjamin Britten… chosen pretty deliberately for its calming qualities. I'm guessing that quite a few of you are balancing the joys and challenges of the holiday season. So if you just want to put your feet up… or you've come to the end of a day with too much red and green in your world and are unwinding… or perhaps heading toward sleep, then I hope you'll enjoy this episode called 'Lullabies and Reveries'. And I'm perhaps using the word 'lullaby' in a broad sense… who says toddlers are the only ones who deserve evocative music to carry them to a dreamy state.